Monday, April 23, 2012

Heraclix & Pomp, Book 2, Chapter 1, Part 1

"And where," you ask, "might I find "Heraclix & Pomp" Book 1?

Well, you can't . . . yet . . . unless you are one of the publishers to whom my agent has sent the manuscript.

Now, since I can't show you "Heraclix & Pomp" in their first adventure, I'll give a sneak peak, here, of their second adventure. I think I'll do this in three parts, since blogs tend to be rather droll when the entries are too long. Please note that this is first draft stuff, not the polished product. If you'd like to see more of my polished product, you can do so at Smashwords and Amazon, of course. While you're reading, I'll continue writing. I'm knee deep in this book and in the third misadventure of Italo and Vincenzo (tentatively entitled "Thieves of the Hidden God"), whom you can read about in Cloaks of Vermin and Fish and in The Doppelgänger's Shadow. But, without further ado, the rough and ready version of Part 1 of Chapter 1 of Book 2 of "Heraclix & Pomp":

Heraclix and Pomp

Book
2

Chapter
1

Gustav left the wedding
party as drunk as the rest of them. But somewhere in the inebriated
folds of his brain lingered the conversation he had earlier that
night with his friend and sometimes-collaborator, Herr Ewers, a
conversation that went something like this:

“No! Oh, no! Herr Thoma
tells me that your little story there has gotten a lot of attention.
'One day,' he says, 'Herr Meyrink will spread his wings and write a
novel of lasting significance.' That's what he said about you! 'A
novel of lasting significance'!”

“Well,” Gustav said
demurely – he was not quite drunk then - “to tell you the truth,
I have had something in mind. My little lockup gave me plenty of time
to think about the direction of my writing, and I've hit on the
kernel of a tale that I'd like to pursue.”

“Do tell,” Herr Ewers
implored. “I'd very much like to hear about it.”

“Alright, then,”
Gustav's eyes narrowed and he hunched over, as if entering some kind
of secret confederacy with his friend. “You know I've lived here,
in Prague, for some time now.”

Ewers nodded.

“Well, I've been here
long enough that some of the locals have come to trust me enough to
share . . .” he paused, looking for the right words, “. . . to
share some juicy rumors that would not typically be voiced around
foreigners.”

“You are a sly devil,
Herr Meyrink.”

“No, not sly, but
friendly, friendly enough that the old Jewish ladies, when they're
not going on and on about 'young people these days,' have dropped an
intriguing crumb or two. One of these,” he narrowed his eyes and
smiled with self-satisfaction, “I believe I can turn into an entire
feast.”

Ewers, suddenly hungry,
looked around, scanning the crowd for the waiter he had earlier seen
carrying a plate of hors d'oeuvre's. Not seeing any nearby food, he
subdued the hunger through sheer will-power. “You intrigue me,
Gustav. Go on.”

“Well, the old ladies
have let on about a story that some time ago an old rabbi had created
a guardian, a magically-animated statue of some sort, they call it a
'golem,' that would protect the Jewish Quarter from outsiders.”

“Like a homunculus, or
a construct!” Ewers said with childlike excitement, the wine
obviously starting to take hold.

“Precisely,” Gustav
said, nearly giddy. “It is said that the only preventative against
the monster unleashing havoc is the tetragrammaton written on its
forehead, by which the rabbi controls the beast. And now, they say,
this golem is stored in the attic of the synagogue at Josefov,
sleeping, awaiting the time when the rabbi should awake it to again
defend the chosen people from some unspecified future threat.”

“Fascinating!” Ewers
said.

“But more fascinating
to me,” Gustav said, “is the ease with which the people believe
the rumor. The peoples' conviction is astounding. They truly believe
the story. To them it's no myth.”

“Well,” Ewers
laughed, “I shall be careful, then, on my walk back home tonight. I
wouldn't want to cross paths with such a creature.”

“Nor I!” Gustav
agreed.

But he did want to do so.

Deep in his heart, he
hoped to cross such a creature, to verify the power behind its
creation. Gustav was a mystic, at heart. In fact, it was his study of
mysticism that led him to be jailed in the first place. He wondered
if, then though that, perhaps there was something to the old ladies'
rumors.

And what if there wasn't?
If he was to look in the attic of the synagogue and find nothing,
that wouldn't prove that the golem never existed, only that it wasn't
there at that time. Maybe it had moved on. Maybe it had never been
there at all. In any case, he couldn't let the lack of present
evidence undermine his faith.

Still, he had to know. So
tonight, while the rabbi was drunk back at the wedding party, he
would take a side trip on the way home in order to visit the
synagogue, just to have a curiosity-satisfying peek. Just this one.
What could it hurt? If he was caught, he would blame the wine. Such
an offense would be forgiven in short order. Besides, it was easier
to gain forgiveness than permission.

The synagogue stood apart
from the other buildings of the Jewish Quarter. It was like a shiny
new egg in the midst of the nest of surrounding apartment flats, each
one decorated with girders and supports that indicated ongoing
construction; the new, the mystical temple arising from the
dust of the tired and the mundane. He was ashamed by the approaching
trespass, embarrassed by events that had not yet even happened. But
he was compelled by this profane urge to see inside that sacred
space. It thrilled him! And it terrified him.

A cold air mass settled
in, turning his breath to frost by the time he sighted the synagogue
through the intervening wooden lattice of the perpetual construction
framework that seemed to hold the quarter's buildings like so many
bugs in a web. The place felt empty, though his eyes saw
candlelight through a window and his ears heard the bang and clatter
of a dropped pail, followed by the startled screech of an alley cat.
Despite these evidences to the contrary, he would have sworn that he
walked completely alone through the cold night, exploring the narrow
streets, which were sandwiched between jealous walls that rose like
canyons to prevent even the stars from peeking in on their private
affairs. Windows crawled higher and higher the nearer he came to the
synagogue, until he thought of himself as a prisoner trapped in some
sort of dungeon labyrinth. A certain presence pressed on him
from behind, as if he was being followed. He occasionally stopped to
listen, but only heard his own footsteps echo off down the alleys,
which caused the hairs on the back of his neck to stand on end.

Just as the cold and his
imagination was about to give him full excuse to abandon his foolish,
drunken quest, the high walls gave way to the synagogue's courtyard.
With renewed determination, he quickly, but clumsily, walked across
the open ground and, pushing the front door open, entered. He knew
that Rabbi Loew would not return for some time and that the rabbi's
assistants were with the old man back at the party. Still, he feared
that the synagogue's attendants might soon return. He was in such a
rush that he dropped several matches as he fumbled around to light an
oil lamp he had found inside, near the door.

Once lit, the lamp did
nothing to assuage his fears. Vaporous phantoms seemed to flit and
crawl about the place, tauntingly changing seats with one another in
the pews or popping up from behind the podium to make a quick mockery
of him before hiding again in the shadows. They deceived him with
several false leads until he found a trapdoor in the ceiling that he
decided was real, even through the mists of fatigue and alcohol.

Thismustbeit, then, he thought. Theatticofthesynagogue.

As the flickering
lamplight settled, he saw it for what it was: an ordinary door in the
ceiling. He chuckled a the banality of it all, laughing with
self-effacing humor at his own drunken folly. WhatanidiotIam, he thought. It'sonlyanatticdoor. Thus emboldened, he took a nearby
ladder, propped it up on the lip of the opening, ascended the rungs,
and lifted the door up and aside to allow himself egress through the
ceiling hole. He could smell burning spider webs as he placed the oil
lamp on the attic floor above him before hoisting himself up and in.

The attic was much
larger than he had pictured in his mind, a man-and-a-half high and
almost equal in height and width to the floor below, though without
the walls, pews and pulpits that obstructed one's appreciation of the
true breadth of the structure. Still, the lamp nearly illuminated
the whole room, with the exception of the shadowed corners. There
were small windows, almost hidden from outside view, along the walls.
They seemed to be constructed only to allow one to look out of the
synagogue, not to look into it. At this time of night, however, they
served only to cast back his own reflection, distorted by the
spider-web-laced glow of the lamp.

He startled at his own
reflection, then laughed, though it was a forced laugh, a conscious
attempt to calm his fears.

He picked his way through
knee-high piles of junk and manuscripts. And old, bent menorah held
vigil over a tidy pile of robes. Several bottles of wine, some of
them, no doubt, of very old vintage, stood ready for feasts and such.
Dusty fingerprints on the bottles showed evidence of a recent
visitor, the rabbi or one of his assistants, having picked through
the cache looking for a bottle or two with which to gift the
newlyweds. A number of strange metal instruments reminiscent of
compasses and squares were gathered together in a geometric zoo of
unknown purpose.

There were several old
furnishings in the room covered by white drop cloths, giving the
illusion of some sort of ghostly conclave of antiques meeting to
decide the fate of the synagogue beneath. One of these cloths, near
the wall farthest from the attic's trap door, covered something long
and low, perhaps eight feet long, four wide, and three high. On one
end, something held the covering aloft even higher, a foot or two
above the average height of the rest of the irregular mass beneath.
The silhouette lacked the angularity of the other covered furniture.
It seemed almost . . . “organic” was the word that came to mind.

Gustav felt drawn to the
mass if for no other reason than the irregularity of its shape piqued
his curiosity. He climbed past odds and ends, sending some items
clattering to the floor as he drunkenly made his way toward the wall.
He looked over one shoulder, then the other, as if he feared he was
being observed. Then he smiled, shook his head at his own paranoia,
and removed the cloth near the taller edge of the mass.

Underneath was an old
hookah covered in dust, despite being protected by the cloth. He was
disappointed by how unremarkable it was. It sat on a large wooden
crate. He noted strange markings etched into the wood directly
beneath and around the hookah's base, possibly Arabic or Hebrew or
something in-between. These had been inked red, and formed a circle
around the object.

He pulled back the drop
cloth a little further, then jumped back when he saw a pair of
immense feet, much larger than any man's that he had encountered in
his life. He was afraid that he might have uncovered a corpse, but a
corpse out of all proportion to human anatomy.

As a passing moment of
sobriety caught him, he laughed. “A statue,” he said. “Probably
the old ladies' golem!” He laughed again.

The moment passed and
drunkenness, along with a growing fear, took hold again. He slowly
removed the cloth, marveling at the statue.

“So lifelike,” he
muttered aloud. “So . . . hideous.”

And, indeed, it was
hideous: A melange of stitched together body parts, obviously not
from the same person. The detail was impressive. Even sutures had
been carved into the statue where the different body parts met. The
face was even more detailed, so much so that Gustav momentarily
thought that the two eyes, one “grafted” from another head, were
two different colors; one red, one indigo. But this was surely a
trick of the bad light, combined with the effects of the wine on his
vision.

On the creature's
forehead, for the statue was most definitely not meant to represent a
human, symbols matching those beneath the hookah had been painted.

“The Tetragrammaton,”
he said, fascinated by the letters. “This is, indeed, a
representation of the golem.”

A tiny noise arose from
inside the hookah's glass. A mouse, perhaps? Gustav stooped closer to
investigate. No, no mouse. This tapping was more regular. Then what?
He held his breath for a moment. Perhaps the sound was coming from
somewhere else.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

No.

He exhaled slowly. It was
definitely coming from inside the hookah.

With great trepidation,
he reached over to wipe away a slash of dust with his finger, and
layer of grime under the dust, and, beneath the grime, glass. Pressed
up against the glass were two tiny balls of white that banged up
against the walls of the hookah. A chill ran up his spine as he
realized they were . . . fists!?

Then a face peered
through the glass, a tiny face, beautiful and terrifying.

Gustav stumbled back a
step. He wished, too late, that he had never drunk that last glass of
wine. His heels caught on something, sending him sprawling backwards.
He reached out a hand to steady himself, but to no avail. One foot
involuntarily kicked up, knocking the hookah on its side. His arms
flailed above him, one of them striking . . . flesh!?

Somehow, he righted
himself. Looking down, he saw where his hand had struck the supine
figure, on the forehead. The sacred, secret name of God had been
smudged, desecrated. The statue's eyes turned in their sockets toward
Gustav.

They were, indeed, red
and blue. And very much alive.

Gustav Meyrink fled the
synagogue, the idea for his next novel planted firmly in his brain.

1 comment:

Forrest Aguirre

Among other things, Forrest Aguirre writes fiction. Forrest's novel, Heraclix & Pomp, is available from Resurrection House. You can find more of his work at Smashwords and Amazon or connect with him on Twitter and Tumblr. His work has appeared in over 50 venues including Asimov's, Gargoyle, Apex Magazine, and American Letters & Commentary and in such anthologies as Polyphony and Paper Cities. Forrest is also an avid tabletop role-playing gamer, having been first introduced to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons back in 1978, when he was a wee lad. He lives, writes, and games in Madison, Wisconsin.